


Craven Addict

by scullydubois



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26154001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullydubois/pseuds/scullydubois
Summary: Delphine could kill for some ice cream, so Cosima goes to get her some. 1x08.
Relationships: Delphine Cormier/Cosima Niehaus
Kudos: 22





	Craven Addict

Cosima buttoned her red wool peacoat with one hand as she left the apartment, sliding her key into the lock and slipping the last button through its hole. One of her neighbors had left the hallway window open and she shivered, pocketing the keys. It was cold out, she remembered too late, cinching the coat’s belt tight around her waist.

She had thrown the coat on over her bra and underwear when she got out of bed, her body still suffused with the warmth of Delphine’s touch. The thought of collecting her clothes from wherever Delphine had let them fall had felt wrong, like a betrayal of sorts, an easily avoidable erasure of what had passed between them in Cosima’s bed. It would have been unseemly, somehow, for Cosima to cover herself while Delphine still lay against the pillows, the curve of her breasts visible behind delicate lace.

  
And anyway, she was only going down the street, to the little corner store where she would get Delphine exactly what she wanted.

  
I could kill for some ice cream, Delphine had said. Cosima had smiled at her, feeling their twinned heartbeats through intertwined fingers, but now, in the dark of the outside, she could not stop herself from thinking of the things that people really would kill for. She knew about those things now. She was one of them.

  
If only everyone could be satisfied so easily as Delphine was, with kisses and ice cream bars.

  
The little bell above the door of the bodega announced Cosima’s arrival, but no one turned to look. Cosima realized she had been expecting stares, as if her fellow shoppers would know from a moment’s glance that she was perilously close to nudity beneath her coat. She almost laughed at herself for thinking it. Strange, how dangerous this felt, when she risked so much more every time she stepped outside with her face uncovered. It was the sort of observation she might have shared with Delphine as they ate their ice cream in bed later, if Sarah hadn’t been so sure that Delphine was Cosima’s monitor. That Delphine was dangerous.

  
Cosima gave in to her brain’s fondest impulse, and imagined herself for a moment as she would a specimen she was studying, a subject under a microscope that had captured her attention. Beth and Alison hated when she talked about herself like a specimen, said it made her sound like one of them, as though science was some darkened corner of the world populated only by conniving men like the ones who had made her and her sisters.

  
But Beth and Alison did not understand that Cosima had always thought this way. To her, specimen meant beautiful, complex, worthy of observation and understanding and analysis. As in, Subject Cosima Niehaus had never been brave enough to go out in public wearing fewer than the requisite number of clothing items before tonight, even though the behavior seemed consistent with her history of spontaneity and her mischievous sense of humor. As in, something about Cosima Niehaus’s brain combined with Dr. Delphine Cormier’s pheromones had given her a brand new thought, inspired her to make a brand new decision, have a brand new experience. A small experience, sure to be inconsequential in the larger picture of Cosima’s life, but nevertheless an experience that existed only because a set of random circumstances had conspired to make her feel bolder than usual on this particular night. Cosima had only shrugged on that peacoat because of the way she had been propped up on her elbow, staring down at Delphine’s imploring face, and it had seemed like the most important thing in the world to stay in the glow of that moment, even if staying meant leaving and coming back with ice cream.

  
Cosima pulled open the door of the bodega’s ice cream freezer and bent to retrieve the box of the Eskimo Pies she had promised Delphine. Eskimo Pies. It was a stupid name for ice cream; racist, even. She would ask Delphine to rename them when she had tried one. Surely she would have some French word to describe them, something lush and lyrical that would drip from her tongue to Cosima’s ears and make her understand love and beauty and biology all at the same time.

  
Cosima could feel the wool of her coat scratching against the bare skin of her belly as she straightened up, rough but reassuring, like a kiss from a desperate lover. She was secure inside the coat, still warm in all the places the wool covered. She hoped Delphine had not moved from beneath the blankets on Cosima’s bed, that the warmth she could feel here in the bodega was somehow the same warmth that still cocooned Delphine, captured and transported inside the red wool coat, a lab sample corked in a beaker.

  
“Is that all?” the clerk asked when she handed him the box of ice cream bars, and she wanted to tell him that he did not know the half of it, that this ice cream was so much more than ice cream, and that tonight was a night of courage and elation and tenderness all mixed together.

  
But Cosima only nodded and paid, and then she stepped out again into the rush of cold night air. The box of ice cream bars chilled her fingers, and she pulled the coat tighter around herself, quickening her pace. Her warmth would be gone by the time she got back to the apartment, but that was all right. She would slide back into bed, burrowing beneath the blankets, and Delphine would be there to warm her, hot fingers against cold ones, skin against skin.

  
Cosima would wriggle out of the red wool coat and huddle instead inside Delphine’s arms, and they would melt together like ice cream.


End file.
